I was observing two of San Francisco’s older housing projects. Potrero Hill and Sunnydale. These date back to the early 1940’s and 1950’s and were the local manifestations of a federal law meant to help construction companies and poor people. The idea was to use federal dollars to pay local construction companies to build housing projects for poor people to live in. America was an openly racist country during those initial decades and San Francisco was no exception. Public housing was segregated until 1968. In fact, the racial patterns of land ownership and housing have always been a challenge to integration and multiculturalism in our community.

The other beneficiaries of the federal law, has always been local construction companies and the politicians who control this source of public funding for large construction projects. They get paid handsomely even if the building falls down in twenty years (or is demolished with dynamite like Geneva Towers.) Some of these projects are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. So it is well worth it for these contractors to find creative ways to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars supporting local politicians and underwriting bond initiatives. And they do.

I created this video to illustrate the waste this system is creating. Right here under our noses, in our midst. It is crazy blatant. Potrero Hill (not even including the terrace) is 3o acres and Sunnydale is 56 acres. They stopped maintaining both projects in favor of demolition many decades ago.

The current rebuilding effort dates back to the days of Gavin Newsom as Mayor. It started with a good 15 years of babble and planning. To date, very little has been accomplished and the quality and durability of even that little bit is highly dubious. An amazing amount of money has been spent with very little to show for it. And when you subtract the net total of boarded up, not maintained or currently habitable units from the number of new units housing people it looks like we are backsliding. We are spending lots of money and actually losing housing units over time, instead of growing our housing base.

But overall, looking at the vast spaces in question. I see 86 acres of public land that ought to be housing a whole lot of people and could be under more creative honest and slightly idealistic management. We need safe housing for working class people in San Francisco. What we are getting is a very corruptive influence on our political system and it is costing us a fortune in a hundred different ways.

Public housing resources in San Francisco are underwriting powerful politicians and buying nice houses and cars for fourth generation privately held family construction companies (that got their start on the first public housing projects). Past that point they are eating up increasingly large amounts of space while housing the smallest number of people possible in a manner that would be considered criminal negligence or constructive eviction if they were normal private landlords.

For historical perspective I thought it would be fun to show pictures of the Potrero Hill site and the Sunnydale site from the days before they were developed. Sunnydale really was small farms and agricultural fields with a stream running through it. They were both considered marginal lands at the time. Sunnydale was also considered to be very desirable when it was first built. In fact both projects feature landscaping, orientation and building details that were quite well done. By comparison the new buildings don’t compare very well. They don’t even have porches or terraces and their feng shui is abysmal.